Exposure to chemical gases and vapors often requires the use of a respirator in order to avoid harmful health effects. Consequently, there are several respirator protection guidebooks currently available which provide information about potentially harmful chemicals disclosed therein. These guidebooks also designate a respirator which is intended to provide a proper level of protection for a corresponding exposure rate of a corresponding quantity of each corresponding chemical disclosed therein.
Moreover, there are software guides currently available which put the information contained in these guidebooks into a database format so that this information may be more easily searched. One example of such a software guide offered by MSA. There are similar systems for the selection of gloves such as Best Gloves, Specwear, Forsburg, and for the selection of detector tubes, such as is offered by Draeger in Germany.
These guidebooks and software guides do not facilitate the selection of respirators based upon interactions between multiple chemicals and based upon multiple levels of exposure to these chemicals. Furthermore, while there are other known software programs which do permit the selection of a respirator based upon multiple chemicals and based upon multiple levels of exposure to these chemicals, these other known software programs are rule-based systems and do not include databases. Another known system is a combination of a database system and a rule-based system. Rule-based systems, and partially rule-based systems (i.e., systems combining a database and a rule-based engine), incorporate many or most of the standards, which govern respirator selection, into a respirator selection engine. However, these fully or partially rule-based systems do not consider the health effects of the chemicals to which people are exposed during the selection of respirators. Moreover, because these fully or partially rule-based systems are rule based, they are very difficult to change. Thus, when government standards, which govern the selection of respirators, change, as they do often, considerable time and effort must be expended in order to upgrade these fully and partially rule-based systems with these standards changes.
The present invention overcomes one or more of the problems discussed above with regard to respirator selection systems.